Lookup Left Most Value

In a given row, Excel has the capacity to lookup the left most non blank item. In the following Excel example I will look up a value on the left most of a particular range. In the below example you can see under Header 3 the left most value in the first row is Data 3. The formula column displays that result.

You can see from the table above that the data in the formula column shows the left most value on each occasion. The Excel formula to achieve this task is as follows.

=LOOKUP(2,1/(A11:F11<>""),A11:E11)

If the data you wanted was the heading associated with the left most value the Excel formula could be changed just slightly.

=LOOKUP(A11,A11:F11,$A$10:$F$10)

In the below Excel file I have included both examples and some VBA which does the same task as the Excel formula.